Sports Fact and Book Rec of the Day 01/08/2008

1/8/1985:
With 26 points, 13 assists, 12 rebounds and 9 steals, the San Antonio Spurs' Johnny Moore just misses a quadruple double as his team sets a franchise record for margin of victory (45 points) in a 139-94 rout of the Golden State Warriors at HemisFair Arena. Moore's exceptional career as a point guard will be seriously curtailed after he's diagnosed with desert fever, a malady indigenous to the Southwest and randomly spread by toxic mold spores. Moore courageously battles the rare disease, even becoming a national figure of awareness for its prevention and cure. Sadly, his energy level cannot sustain the rigors of the NBA and he's out of the league by 1990.

Birthdays:
Walker Cooper b. 1915
Bruce Sutter b. 1953
Dwight Clark b. 1957
Jason Giambi b. 1971
Mike Cameron b. 1973

1/8/1988:
Brian Boitano won the U.S. men's figure skating championship for the fourth consecutive year.

"Boitano wowed the audience with a crackling, confident interpretation of a scene from Meyerbeer's ballet Les Petineurs (The Skaters). The highlight came when Boitano, skating the role of the arrogant show-off, landed a triple-double combination, then seamlessly wiped his skate blade with his fingers and flicked the snow back over his shoulder." -E.M. Swift, January 18, 1988


Here Ackerman, author of A Natural History of the Senses and A Natural History of Love, turns her idiosyncratic poetic prose to a discussion of the brain, “that little everywhere, that fickle pleasuredrome.” Ackerman brings an enormous amount of reading and research to bear on her subject and ranges over the science and literature of memory, language, consciousness, writing, and learning. You either love her or hate her; some find her brilliant, others a pretentious bore. That’s the fickle pleasuredrome for you.

AN ALCHEMY OF MIND: THE MARVEL AND MYSTERY OF THE BRAIN, by Diane Ackerman (Scribner, 2004)